a blog about the passion for research, the research on passion, motivation and emotion, experience sampling, and occasionally also about open science

Is high student engagement always desirable? Did you ever feel so committed and motivated to a task that you engaged in it to the point of becoming exhausted? Are student engagement and burnout at school mutually exclusive experiences, or can they co-occur in some individuals?

A recently published study in the journal Learning and Instruction examined these questions and found that some students are at the same time engaged and show symptoms of burnout at school. The study showed that such constellations of co-occurring light and dark sides of engagement might be overlooked if only the -negative- correlation between engagement and burnout is considered, but that they can be detected with analyses that look out for profiles and subgroups of individuals (e.g., latent profile analyses). The article also shows ways to measure situational aspects of student engagement, and the relation between such situational measures to the profiles of co-occurring engagement and burnout.